ORIA FILMS

The anti-fascist guerilla fighters

The Spanish Civil War did not end with the final dispatch on April 1st, 1939 sent by Franco’s Army in Burgos. As they had been doing ever since the military coup d’état took place, men and women either on the run from repres-sive measures or who refused to accept defeat sought refuge in the mountains, where they found other ways of fighting Franco’s regime. Actually, one could say the guerillas started fighting on July 18th, 1936, when contingents of Repub-lican militants separated from the government’s army set up their own isolated groups of soldiers who fought from the rearguard.

Once the Second World War began, the guerilla fighters -who had held on despite the isolation and hardship conditions- hoped that this armed conflict beyond Fascist borders was a sign of resistance to Fascism, and they began to re-organize themselves. The different guerilla groups were located mainly in the mountains of Extremadura, Andalucía, Galicia and León, the Cantabrian coast, Catalunya, Aragón and the provinces of Castellón, Valencia, Alicante and Murcia. They managed to coordinate what they called the National Guerilla Army, as well as Libertarian Action Groups, which had their greatest effect be-tween 1944 and 1946. Their attacks during that period made the Regime uneasy, but it hid any information about them, so newspapers and radio broadcasts made no mention of them.

The end of the Second World War meant there was no longer any threat of an attack by the Allied Forces. This was the hardest blow the guerilla forces had ever taken. Franco’s government then decided to say the conflict was a problem of public order, and started to call the “Maquis” or guerilla fighters mere bandits. Given the change in the international situation, the political orga-nizations in exile recommended that the guerillas disband. Even so, many of the guerilla fighters kept on. Officially, the last “Maqui”, José Castro Veiga, ”The Pilot”, the Chief of the General Staff of the guerillas, died in a clash with the Civil Guard in 1965. From the time the guerilla warfare began, for all those years, civilians suspected of collaborating with the “mountain men” were jailed, tortured or killed. Many of them were women and children.

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